Riding Shotgun
by AngharadTheRowan
Summary: What's it like to be taken over by a demon? To be alone in your body, watching someone move you, do things, say things you never would? What if... what if it wasn't so bad? OC. Sam and his bitchface, Dean foulmouthed - in other words, business as usual.
1. Weeping Willow

**First of all, let's get the usuals out of the way – I own Jessica. No, not that Jessica, THIS Jessica. That's about it. No money being made, blah blah blah.**

**My first shot at multichaptered SPN fic. Hope you all like it.**

_**Katy, Texas**_

I never had an ordinary life, and seven days before my eighteenth birthday, it got worse.

I know, I know. Everybody says their life isn't normal. Everyone thinks they're unique in some weird, bad way. And I won't lie; some of them are – but you really, really don't want to get in that contest with me. I will win. I had the My Life Sucks award all but won before September 25th, but after...? Hand me a crown and throw a sash over my dress, because I am the queen of Personal Hell.

It was like any other day. The day dawned dreary in my small suburb of Houston, hot and humid. My waist-length hair frizzed and kinked, and my bangs fell limply against my forehead. I cursed everything as I walked – my ankle-length dress, the sleeves that rubbed at my wrists, the backpack that made my shoulder ache. I was five minutes away from my high school when I saw him standing in the middle of the sidewalk. I kept walking and lowered my gaze; he stayed where he was and stared at me, a small smirk on his face.

My mind buzzed. What did he want? Rape? Someone to beat up? My lunch money?

"Hello, Jessica," he said in a low, smooth voice.

I tried to ignore him and walk past. I saw the cars, the buses whizzing by out of the corner of my eye and hoped maybe someone would see something wrong. Please, somebody... call the police. Help me. I knew they wouldn't, though; even if this man beat me senseless, people would look away and pretend they hadn't seen it. Who wants to get involved in someone else's mess?

The man blocked my attempt to move past, twice. I gave up and timidly looked up at him. I don't know what fear smells like, but from where my nose stood, it was probably something like massive deodorant failure. Great; now I was embarrassed on top of freaking out.

"I need you," the man said. Oh God.

"I don't know you," I said in a small voice. "Please let me go."

He cocked his head and smiled wider. "Can't do that."

I was desperately trying to size him up. He wasn't too tall; about six feet to my five feet and four inches. Pretty trim, I guess. White but pale, with a tinge of blue to his skin. His white dress shirt sleeves were rolled up, and I could see streaks of purple running up his arm. My heart beat faster... a junkie?

"Please," I whispered, as he stepped towards me. "Let me go. I'm just a student in high school. I don't have any money... I mean, I have lunch money, but that's just like five bucks and I'll give it to you if you want and please, I'm nobody, just let me go..."

"Sorry, kid. I need your body."

Oh Jesus. Rape. I was gonna get raped five minutes away from my high school, on the side of a busy street, while everyone looked the other way and nobody cared. I reflexively hugged my arms and wished my legs would run, but I was doing everything I could just to keep myself from hyperventilating.

"Calm down, baby," he said, reaching out a placating hand and patting my shoulder. And then... then... His eyes turned black. Pure black. All of them. There were no whites, no irises, no pupils, just black. Completely opaque and a deep pit, all at the same time.

I couldn't breathe.

His mouth opened, impossibly wide, and the last thing I saw before I blacked out was thick black smoke pouring out of his nose and mouth.

_**Jessica's Place**_

I woke up in the last place I imagined I'd be.

Before we moved to Katy, I'd lived in Richardson, Texas. Yet another suburb, this one of Dallas, not Houston. I was shunned by the other kids, and who could blame them, really? They wore jeans and miniskirts. They went to the mall. They listened to loud music about sex and fumbled with each other's most private parts under the bleachers. I wore dresses that covered everything to my wrists, knees, and neck, and wasn't allowed to cut my hair. When I went out, it was to the church my parents made me go to. I didn't hold iPods. I held the Bible my parents made me carry all the time.

My one tiny piece of freedom came at night; while my parents slept, I snuck out of my well-oiled bedroom window and headed behind the subdivision we lived in. Sandwiched between my subdivision and another one, there was a stream, about five feet wide. Grass grew on either side, and a weeping willow bent its beautiful head next to it. If you ignored the granite sewer tunnel that the stream disappeared into, it was a piece of heaven. A wild, untamed, free-growing piece of Utopia, where nobody bothered me. No insults, no jokes from cruel kids. No parents watching me with eagle eyes and calling out every time I "sinned", no speeches about the lake of fire I was surely headed to. Just me, the soft tinkle of water over stone, and the wind through the branches of the willow tree. I could have stayed there forever.

And when I woke up there, I was confused as hell.

The businessman was there, adding to the confusion, leaning against the trunk of the tree. "I'm impressed, I must say. Most people just kind of have this... black spot. Some dark room they wake up in, not this. It's nice," he said, gesturing to the tree and the moon overhead.

"I don't... I... Where am I? I can't really be here, I can't... What... Why?" I stuttered.

He grinned and put hind hands in his pockets. "Short version, kid? I needed a new body. Old one was wearing out and getting a bit recognizable. And you're about perfect, darlin'."

I hugged my knees and stared blankly at the water.

He laughed. "You don't even care? No hitting me, no demands, no attempt to knee me in the jewels? You don't even want to know why I called you perfect?"

No answer. I was trying to slow my breathing.

He nodded. "Okay. Fine. Well, enjoy the ride, kid. I can't say how long you'll last." He disappeared.

I laid back down on the grass and closed my eyes.

_**East Bumfuck, Ohio**_

"Fuck."

"Dude, do you always have to cuss like that?"

Dean turned slowly and stared into Sam's eyes, slightly hitching up one eyebrow. "Shit. Damn. Fuck. Motherfucking cocksucker. Cum guzzling-"

Sam threw his hands up. "Okay, okay!"

Dean leaned back with his hands behind his head and laughed. "Fuck's not so bad."

Sam looked disgusted. "Cum guzzling? Really?"

"Please. You shoulda heard what I had planned for right after that."

"Ugh," Sam said, pursing his lips. "I think I'll pass."

Dean shrugged nonchalantly. "Nothing you haven't heard from porn, man."

"_Dude," _Sam said. "I'm not discussing porn with you."

"If you were any easier to get riled... I mean, seriously, Sam. I have to put up with you all the time, might as well give me a challenge."

Dean received a pointed glare in response.

He adjusted his tie and sighed. "Hate these goddamn things. Don't feel like I can breathe." He jiggled the knot against his adam's apple a little. "We gonna sit here all day with you PMSing, or are we gonna go?"

Sam bit his bottom lip and exited the car.

The home was like every other one whose door they'd banged on – someone's slightly dirty version of the white picket fence dream. A tired-looking woman answered the door, just like every other house. This is the American Dream, thought Dean; you start with the idea that you're going to be the next big star or write the next great novel, and you end up tired, with too much padding around the middle and too many "playdates".

Heh. "Playdates". The word made Dean think of these two blonde chicks who he got to dress in schoolgirl uniforms -

Ow. Sam elbowed him in the ribs. Focus. "Yes, ma'am, hi. We're from the FBI," he said, flashing the old fake license in his pocket. "I'm agent Turner, and this is agent Hooch." The woman looked at him like he was insane. "Yeah, I know," he said, putting on his highest watt smile. "The local office got a huge kick out of pairing us together." He leaned close. "He's still the dog." He could feel Sam's bitchy face behind him, and the woman relaxed a little. Bingo. "May we come in?"

_**East Bumfuckian Living Room, Ohio**_

Sam handed the woman a tissue. "I don't know what he was doing in Texas! I.." she broke down in tears again.

"It's okay, ma'am," Sam said soothingly. "I know this is hard, but if you can tell me everything you know..."

She blew loudly into her tissue. "Adam and I... we were fighting. Just a little, not too bad, you know? Normal marriage stuff." She looked up for permission to go on. Sam nodded, and Dean was already reliving playing school time with the Doublemint twins. "We'd had... money problems. Nothing huge, just... who buys a freaking brand-new laptop when we're having trouble hitting our mortgage payment? I mean, really-"

Sam cleared his throat.

"Anyway," she continued, coloring a little, "nothing out of the ordinary. And then the bank robbery happened, and he... he just wasn't the same. He was gone within a day." She put her hands in her lap and sighed. "And then the bank called to tell me he'd wiped out our account..."

"Did he show any signs before that that something was wrong? I mean, anything really out of the ordinary?"

"Not using deodorant, smelling like rotten eggs?" Dean offered out of boredom.

"What?"

"Nothing," Sam quickly said. "Tourette's. It's amazing how well they can control it these days."

"Fuck," Dean said cheerily. "Oops. Sorry."

"Anyhow," Sam said, stretching out the syllables, "Adam. Seeming different. Did he?"

"No," the woman said, looking down. "By the time he changed, he'd left."

_**Jo's Diner**_

Dean stuffed a forkful of hashbrowns into his mouth as Sam rested his forehead on the table. "Told you he wouldn't have come back," he said between loud smacking sounds. "I'm tellin' ya. Straight demon possession. Not worth our time."

Sam sat up. "Since when is a demon possession beneath us?"

"I'm just saying... bigger fish to fry."

"Yeah, well, the bigger fish aren't biting. And there's some poor guy out there being used as some asshole demon's meatsuit, and he's trapped. We have a duty to free him."

"You forget," Dean said, stabbing his eggs. Oh God, the fork stayed upright. Ew. "Guy's dead. You found this case because he was found hundreds of miles from home, dead, on the sidewalk, used up like a bad suit."

"Then the demon moved on."

"And we have no idea who to, no way of tracking it."

Sam crossed his arms. "We've got nothing else. Things are... quiet."

"Fine," Dean said as a blob of egg slid off his fork. "Podunk it is."

_**Truck Flap Motel**_

That night, they stayed at yet another corny motel. Sam wondered at Dean's ability to find them; in every town, he had an amazing ability to pass up the local Holiday Inn and find a place whose décor had been inspired by a truck flap. Sam sometimes longed for bland and blah, but it always ended in Dean fingering a hanging disco ball and going "C'mooon, this is awesome!"

So here they were, after ten hours of solid driving, in some cheap motel. Sam listened to Dean snore lightly in the other bed, and he smiled gently at the tiny bit of normalcy. He turned onto his side, his legs shifting under the cheap percale, and he closed his eyes. And with the final thought of "need better sheets", Sam Winchester slid into sleep and dreamed.

_**Jessica's Place**_

It was nighttime, and the stars twinkled merrily overhead. Sam found himself on a grassy slope, looking at a thin stream of... liquid. He hoped it was water. He couldn't smell anything, anyway, and it sure rushed over the stones in the stream's bed like water.

"So who the heck are you?"

Sam looked around to find a willow tree, and a girl sitting sullenly underneath it. "Uh, Sam. I'm Sam. Winchester." Since when did he give out his real name? Oh, right. Dream. He relaxed.

"You trapped too?"

'Trapped? No. Dreaming, I think," he said, shoving his hands in his jean pockets. She nodded, and he bounced a little on his heels. What do you say to a thirteen-year-old chick when you're dreaming? Hell, what do you say to them in real life?

"Hmmph. Dreaming," she said. "Don't know what I want more, to stay here or to wake up."

"You mean you don't wake up?"

She wiggled her toes in the grass. "Sure I do. But when I can see, I'm doing things... Well, things I wouldn't do, anyway."

Sam sat down next to her. "Things like what?"

She looked up at him from under her bangs. "I steal money from people."

Sam laughed. "That's it? That's the worst you've done? Look, when I was thirteen-"

Her eyes turned to steel. "I'm almost eighteen, thank you. I mean, I will be. Tomorrow. Sort of."

Sam's eyes widened. "Oh. Sorry," he said. "You don't look eighteen." She just stared at him, an eyebrow arched. "What?"

"I'm waiting for the 'that's what she said' or the 'if I had a nickel' jokes."

He let out a weak chuckle. "I got nothin'." Sighing, he kicked off his shoes and joined her in wiggling her feet in the grass. "This is weird."

"Uh, yeah, genius," she said, half-laughing.

"I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know you," he said, quizzically looking at the ground.

The girl shrugged. "Don't know you either, Sam Winchester, but I know this place."

"Wait. I'm in _your_ dream?"

She shrugged again. "What, you think I know what's going on?"

Sam had precisely thirty seconds to consider the pure freakiness of what it could mean to be in a teenage girl's dream world before he woke up.

**I don't know about you guys, but my 13-year-old head? Sam Winchester wouldn't want to have been aaaanywhere near it. Neither would half the Power Rangers, for reasons that shall remain unexplained. My eighteen-year-old head? FAR worse.**

**If you liked this, drop me a line. And while you're telling me that you liked it, you can tell me who should've stayed the hell away from your head when you were thirteen and eighteen.**


	2. Bad Curtains

**Once again, I own nothing but Jessica. And the word "fuck". Well, I like to think I own that one... but I share liberally.**

_**Jessica's Place**_

The businessman appeared again. Jessica was playing with her fingernails.

"You're not fighting me." It was a statement, not a question.

Jessica looked up at his everyman facade. "Why should I?" she said, bored.

He looked affronted. "Every other human being fights me. Every other person has blackness that they get trapped in. And I know you see me when you close your eyes; aren't you mad at me?" He stepped closer, menacingly. "Aren't you angry at what you see? I dress you in indecent scraps, I take others' money, I steal others' possessions."

The girl shrugged. "You call that bad? Please. I saw more bad in thirty minutes at my high school. And why fight?" she said, tossing a dandelion aside. "I've got no choice. I know why you picked me, why you called me perfect. Nobody's gonna miss me, look for me." She looked up. "That's why, isn't it? Isn't it?"

He cocked his head and considered her for a moment, before nodding in approval. "Not bad," he said. "Apathy. I like it. Well, as long as you're along for the ride willingly, you might as well get some benefit out of it. Here," he said, a plastic bag materializing. He dropped it on the ground next to her. "An upgrade." He vanished on the spot.

She crept over to the bag and rifled through it. A black skirt, if you could call it that – she doubted it would reach halfway down her thighs – and a baby blue camisole. She fingered the cheap cotton; she could almost hear her mother, calling it a "whore's costume". She pictured walking in to school wearing this, garnering stares after the long years of bad flowered prairie girl dresses. They'd point. They'd laugh, just laugh harder.

Her mind's eye reset things, had her dressed to the nines, her hair perfectly cut and moving behind her as if there was a wind. Her classmates didn't laugh; they stood up slowly or stopped what they were doing. Mouths hung open in admiration and surprise. She could feel the stale air move as she strutted by haughtily.

She dropped the clothes. She was kidding herself. Again. And she wasn't ready to put on a skirt that she couldn't bend over in, not yet; she'd just spend all her time hugging herself, trying to cover up, even here – where only the Businessman could see her.

"I can't do this," she yelled. "It's too much."

A glint caught her eye, and she looked down at the grass between her feet. A pair of scissors lay there.

Jessica sat, staring at the scissors for a long time, and she nodded. This she could do. A fair exchange – a few illegal activities for a few inches.

She reached behind herself and grabbed handfuls of her weighty brownish hair. She'd begged so hard to cut it when she was little; all she got in return were endless speeches about her hair being her strength and a woman's beauty and blah, blah, blah.

Well, take this, Mother, she thought as she hacked away at her hair. I'll decide what's pretty.

_**Katy, Texas**_

Welcome to Podunk.

Alright, not Podunk, really. Sam corrected him on that; apparently, Katy had over 12,000 people living in it. Dean countered with "It's a suburb in Texas; small town in Texas equals podunk. Discussion over", but he knew he was wrong. It wasn't half bad. In fact, it was kinda nicer than most places they ended up in, with burger joints on most corners. There'd be a lack of cheesy motels, though. Dammit.

Sam looked oddly happy sitting there in one of the chain hotel's suites. He watched his brother sprawl out on the little "living room" couch, his big-ass feet dangling over the side, a small grin on his face.

"You know I will get exactly zero chicks in this place," Dean said.

Sam shrugged. "Not my problem." He flicked the TV on.

Dean stared for a moment. "Aren't you supposed to be on your computer or some crap like that? Y'know, local news? Scary local stories?" No response. "Wooo?" he said, wiggling his fingers.

A commercial for the local news came on. "Next, a story about a missing high school girl," some run-of-the-mill newscaster said. "Is she missing – or is she a runaway who can't be found? Story at six."

Sam just looked at Dean, dangling the remote from his fingers, a smirk on his face.

Dean turned away and went to collect his suit. "Goddammit," he grumbled.

_**Katy Police Station**_

Another police station, another fake FBI performance.

Dean looked down at the girl's file. One Jessica Anne Masterson. Five foot four, waist-length brown hair, brown eyes, light skin. Family – mom, dad, that's all. Apostolic Pentecostals, which, from Sam's aside glance, Dean guessed explained the Little House On The Prairie vibe.

Apparently the girl had vanished a week before her eighteenth birthday. No trace. And worse yet, nobody seemed to care.

"And the family thinks she ran away?" Sam said.

"Yeah," the officer was saying. "Said she was willful." He looked down at his fingers. Dean knew what was coming next. "I don't get why the FBI is interested in this. We can take care of it," he said, puffing his chest out a bit.

"That's what we do, runaways," Dean said with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

"Oh. Well. Have at it, then," the policeman said, shrugging. "Y'all ask me, she's probably better off where she is."

"If she wasn't taken by some crazy," Sam said with a tight smile.

He just shrugged again in response.

_**Just Another Chain Hotel**_

Night fell at the hotel. Dean stared the file down, rubbing his lower jaw.

"She's last seen in the very place that Adam Hunt's body is discovered. Her parents think she ran off, her classmates don't really care... I think we found the demon's next victim," Sam said, staring at his computer.

"Poor kid," Dean mused.

"Yeah. You should hear what the other kids are saying about her."

Dean eyed Sam. "Are we into high school gossip now? Really?"

Sam spun his laptop toward his brother. "It's not school gossip, Dean. It's Facebook."

He reached for the computer. "It's school gossip."

Someone had created a Facebook group for "Jessica Masterson's gone!" The page had twenty two people who'd given it a thumbs up. Dean's eyebrows raised reading the comments. This girl got called a freak, a loser, a few things even Dean wouldn't say. "Man, she musta done something real bad to piss off everybody like this."

"I don't think so," Sam said, sighing. "Dean, I think she was just different. The bottom of the social totem pole."

"It doesn't warrant this!"

"Dean, what would you have said about some girl in high school who wore nothing but heavy denim dresses, didn't cut her hair, and barely talked to anyone else?"

Dean pursed his lips and shifted his line of sight to the ceiling.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Sam looked a moment more at the screen before closing it.

_**A Slighty Dirty Shower Stall**_

Sam took a good long shower. He scrubbed furiously at his body, like the dirt from all those horrible comments could come off.

That weird girl's gone? Yessss!

Maybe she got taken by some Leatherface dude who's gonna use her for curtains.

Oh, come on. Carissa, you really think anyone would use her dresses or her face as curtains?

Good point. Most people have better taste than that, lol!

U gUyZ I hOeP sHeZ gOn.

Sam shuddered at that last one and wondered why the hell his brain would remember – and repeat back – such horrible grammar. Maybe that's what Hell was – really horrible Internet grammar, played over and over and over.

He rinsed off and scrubbed himself dry, and then slid into his double bed. Dean turned over and grumped at him. "You took all the hot water."

Sam turned over. Cheap percale again. "Deal with it in the morning," he mumbled, before sleep overtook him.

_**Jessica's Place**_

That dream again... that weird little area with the wanna-be creek, at night, and the thirteen year old girl. Wait, no. Eighteen, not thirteen.

Sam cocked his head at the girl, who'd gone a bit... Lady Gaga? Not her clothes, her hair. It had been chopped, roughly, asymmetrically, above her shoulders. She still wore the denim gown, but the sleeves were rolled up this time.

He sat down next to her. "So. Hi again."

She squinted and shook her finger at him. "Sam... Sam something or other."

"Yeah." They both looked the opposite direction. This was awkward. "Um, so, what am I doing in your dream? That's what we established, right? This is your dream?"

"Well, do you usually dream about young girls in a spot sandwiched between subdivisions?"

Sam opened and clothed his mouth a few times.

"Okay," she said with a laugh. "I don't wanna know what you dream about."

Sam smiled and shrugged. "I dream about what my life would've been like had I saved Jess somehow."

She started. "Jess? Jessica? You dream about saving me? Am I dead?"

"No! No." He shrugged again, grinning sheepishly. "Jess... Jess was my girlfriend. A demon killed her." Once again, with the flat-out truth... this was weird.

"Oh. I'm a Jessica."

He nodded. "So, I'm a Jessica, what are you doing here? What is here, anyway?"

"This is my spot. Y'know, everybody has one."

Sam blinked in confusion. "Your spot?"

"This is where I go when things get bad." She smiled down at a bluebonnet and lightly ran her finger over the flower. "My own private place. People might know about it, but they don't care about it like I do."

"Ah. I get you now," Sam said, smiling. "I used to have one. My dorm at Stanford... I ran all the time, and about a mile away was an elementary school. Run late enough, and nobody cared about the big college student on the swings." He laughed a little, resting his arms on his knees.

"You used to think about things there? About life?"

"Yeah. Everything," Sam said, smiling.

"Well, this is my spot. My house is over that way," Jessica said, pointing, "and my high school's over that way."

Sam jumped up. "Come on, then," he said, offering a hand. "Let's go."

Jessica's smile became cold. "Why don't you try? I'll just stay right here. Go on," she said, as Sam looked at her with creased eyebrows. "That way."

Sam shrugged. "Okay." He got up, and made his way across the small stream. There was the back side of a fence nearby, and Sam strode purposefully toward it – until he stopped. His foot hit something, and he looked down. Nothing. Air. He kicked again, and cursed a little as he banged his toe. Feeling like something of a mime, he reached his hands out palm-first and gently felt the area he'd kicked. It was a barrier, alright. Cold, a little... made his palms tingle a bit. He frowned and stared at his hand, and then turned to look back at Jessica. She was staring after him with a smile; Sam didn't know whether she was happy or sad. He hurried back over the slick stones and stood before her, not knowing what to say.

"Before you go wasting your time," she said with a smile, "you can't reach my high school either. Not that you'd want to."

He sat back down next to her, awkward silence filling the still air. Sam said the only thing he could think of. "You, uh, cut your hair, I think."

She looked at Sam, really looked at him – and laughed. A small tear escaped. "One little sin at a time, Sam."

**If you like it, then you shoulda put a... Um, 'scuse me. I went on auto. If you like it, drop me a line and let me know. And while you're at it, tell me about your worst hairdo. Mine? Junior year of high school. Everyone was wild about spiral perms, and my mom insisted on doing mine at home. I looked like a poodle. An angry, hormonal, teenage, acne-speckled poodle.**


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